Homegrown apps retrospective

I know these kinds of posts about internal apps may be less interesting since you can’t actually use any of the mentioned software, but on the off chance that some of the ideas somehow prove useful in some small way to someone, here we go. These apps were all written by hand, by the way, no AI involved. I should probably include updated screenshots, but then I might never actually get around to posting this, so we’re going purely verbal for now. In alphabetical order: Bookshelf, my reading tracker, which I’ve been using pretty much daily over the past fifteen years to keep track of which page I’m on in each book and also (via the automatically generated stats) as strong motivation to reach my per-day and per-book page count reading goals. I love it. No plans to move to something else. Cast, my static site generator, used to build this site for the last year and a half. Glad I finally put in the time to make this happen, because I love static files and having fewer moving parts, and…